The German Justice Minister has called the British spy agency’s massive eavesdropping of international fiber-optic cables 'a catastrophe'. Sabine Leuthesser-Scharrenberger insisted European institutions should seek clarification “straight away”.

The exposure by former US National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden of the global eavesdropping capabilities of the
British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have sent
European capitals into a stupor.

Having revealed the NSA’s PRISM global surveillance program,
Snowden told the UK’s Guardian newspaper information about
Britain's top secret Tempora surveillance project under which the
UK's GCHQ spying agency intercepts and stores for 30 days huge
volumes of data, like emails, social network posts, phone calls
and much more, culled from international fiber-optic cables.

The most vociferous reaction has come from Berlin where
politicians have demanded a thorough investigation of the
activities of the British intelligence-gathering community.

“If these accusations are correct, this would be a
catastrophe,” German Justice Minister Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in an email to the Reuters. She
compared the news with a “Hollywood nightmare” and called
on to the European institutions “to seek straight away to
clarify the situation.”

“The accusations make it sound as if George Orwell's
surveillance society has become reality in Great Britain,"
Thomas Oppermann, the leader of the opposition Social Democrats
in the Bundestag told Reuters. German politicians called the
situation ‘unbearable’ and demanded the government “act
against a total surveillance of German citizens”.

A report in Britain's Guardian newspaper has exposed that UK’s
GCHQ has been spying on European capitals for at least 18 months
intercepting data from over 200 fiber-optic cables.

Begun in 2008, by 2010 the Tempora project made GCHQ a true
intelligence superpower, “’the biggest internet access’ of any
member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance,
comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,”
The Guardian’s report claims.

By the end of 2012 the GCHQ agency reportedly had enough
computational capacity to process information from 46 fibre-optic
cables at a time, which amounted to 600 million international
phone calls and internet messages daily.

While it was reported earlier that NSA shared classified
information obtained through its tapping of the world’s largest
internet providers with GCHQ, it became known that these were tit
for tat relations and GCHQ shared the info it obtained with the
NSA, too. The Guardian believes that the 850,000 NSA employees
and US private contractors, like Edward Snowden, had access to
GCHQ databases.

“The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden confirmed
to the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US,” he
stressed.